Four gunmen killed and attempted to hold hostages in a church in Chechnya

Local security forces killed four gunmen who tried to hold hostages in a church in the Chechen capital of Grozny during a raid that killed two policemen and a civilian, authorities said.

“The gunmen infiltrated the Church of the Archangel Michael” in the center of Grozny and “sought to take her as hostages,” Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said in a statement distributed by Russian agencies. “An immediate security operation killed all four militants.”

Kadyrov stressed that ‘practical information that the militants have ordered the implementation of the operation from one of the Western countries’.

The Chechen president pointed out that ‘immediately arrived at the scene of the incident where he directly monitored the special security operation’, pointing out that their implementation ‘took only a few minutes’, according to ‘R.T’.

The Chechen president said the incident killed one policeman and wounded one parish, but the Russian Investigation Commission later reported that a second policeman and a civilian were also killed by injuries sustained by the attack.

Later, Kadyrov confirmed through his channel that the security services succeeded in identifying all four attackers, noting that three of them were residents of the outskirts of the capital Grozny. The fourth, the leader of the gang, descended from an area adjacent to Chechnya.

The president added that investigations into the attack on the church were continuing, including measures aimed at identifying potential agents for the four gunmen who had been liquidated.